Hi All, I was recently, umm, persuaded to join this ML - clearly I did something wrong in a previous life :-) Forgive me if the following is inappropriate or has been discussed already, so far I've only been subjected to vast torrents of PD discussions so I'm not sure what goes on at other times!
There's a few sections of the license draft[1] that I'm concerned about, and I'll start with the following. Under section 4.6 Access to Derivative Databases, it says: "The Derivative Database (under a.) or alteration file (under b.) must be available at no more than a reasonable production cost for physical distributions and free of charge if distributed over the internet." I'm concerned about the latter phrase. OSM data is large and growing quickly, and bandwidth isn't free, certainly not at this scale. If we take the current case - a planet download is 4.5Gb and (for the sake of an example) Amazon S3 download costs start at USD0.17 per gigabyte, it would cost me currently 0.76 dollars per download. It's not hard to conceive of those costs being higher - bandwidth is much more expensive for some parts of the world (e.g. Africa) and if I happened to derive a db from both OSM and SRTM data (some form of cycle map, perhaps), the resultant file could be much more than 4.5Gb Given that I wouldn't want to be liable for uncapped and uncappable bandwidth charges, I would therefore only make the derivative db available on physical distributions. Is it an intended side effect of the license to discourage internet-based distribution of derivative dbs? My suggestion would be that recovering "reasonable production cost" should also be extended to "reasonable distribution cost" for internet distribution too. My idea would be that the marginal cost (i.e. the bandwidth for the given download) is recoverable, but not e.g. man hours in setting up the download server. Any thoughts? Cheers, Andy [1] http://foundation.openstreetmap.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/open_database_licence_2008-04-10_draft.pdf _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
